The invention relates to the feeding of bottle closure members, and especially concerns the feeding of wire-like closure elements toward a machine which installs such closure elements onto champagne bottles. Still more particularly, the invention concerns methods and apparatus for the individual feeding-in, without interruption, of wire closures from a locally fixed magazine. The closures are supplied by the magazine and are lined up in rows. The closures are delivered to a wiring machine for champagne bottles in the rythm of the wiring by way of an endless intermediate conveying member having receivers. As will be discussed, the transfer of the closures from the magazine to the intermediate conveying member is controlled, contingent on the acceptance of closure members at the place of wiring.
Previous techniques for feeding closure members to a wiring machine have been employed in the past. These techniques generally operate according to a principle wherein a wire closure is taken from a magazine and placed on a conveyor receiver only whenever a bottle reaches the intake of the wiring machine and triggers a mechanical or pneumatic signal. Constructively conditional, the place for scanning the bottle is relatively far away from the place of putting the closure member onto the conveyor, which gives rise to various difficulties the higher the output of the installation becomes. Thus, in case of large and fast running installations, it will be almost impossible to establish a synchronization between the scanning of the bottles at the wiring machine inlet and the removal of wire closures from the magazine. This is so because of the large, required number of wire closures and the longer transportation routes of the individual closures to the wiring machine. Thus, the wire closures will already have to be removed from the magazine and placed on the receiving units of an intermediate conveying member before the assigned bottle reaches the inlet of the wiring machine at all. Moreover, complicated and cumbersome transmissions of the signal produced at the inlet by the bottle to the controls of the mechanism which feeds closure elements onto the conveyor are unavoidable with an increasing size of the machine.
Electric controls are not very suitable, because of the electric lifting elements used in connection with them, the required switching frequencies for modern heavy-duty machines because of the forces required thereby. Also, the efficiency of the known putting-on arrangements, vis-a-vis variable running speeds in case of a greater control area, have placed some limits on a simple enlargement of the known arrangements.
Therefore, the invention is based on the object of creating a process for feeding closure members wherein the perforce enlarged distances between the bottle inlet and the closure-carrying magazine will no longer have a disturbing effect on a feed in case of rising hourly output and on the synchronization (of necessity made difficult by increased distances and output) between irregular intake of the bottles and putting-on of the individual wire closures.
Furthermore, it is an object to create an apparatus for feeding closure members, which apparatus is not burdened by the disadvantages of complicated and cumbersome transmissions of signals via kinematic-mechanical connections or of greater volumes of the filled lines in case of pneumatic controls, which disadvantages limit a great increase in the hourly output.
It is another object of the invention to provide an effective closure feeding system which establishes a continuous flow of closures and which utilizes a uniquely arranged sensing system to prevent multiple depositing on a conveyor receiver.